Poetic License

'Tales Of Hoffmann' Strikes Many Chords

It's lucky for The Tales of Hoffmann that it contains such bewitching music and such arresting, offbeat stories. If it didn't, opera companies might just take the easy way out and leave it alone.

Jacques Offenbach's last creation, which opens the Orlando Opera season on Friday, is something of a problem child.

It isn't a problem for audiences, you understand. No opera so filled with seductive music could be.

The silky "Barcarolle" is one of the best-known numbers in opera. The opera's hero takes off on flights of suave, soaring music each time he's in love -- and he has four different objects of affection during the course of the tales.

The aria for Olympia, the focus of one of Hoffmann's infatuations, has a sparkle that makes it a favorite of sopranos and listeners alike. At the other end of the spectrum, the aria for Dapertutto -- one of four sinister figures who thwart Hoffmann's romances -- is as sleek, in its resonant way, as the "Barcarolle."

Their diabolical air lends these tales a far different aura than the typical operatic romance -- only natural for a piece based on writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, the German whose surreal stories helped pave the way for Edgar Allan Poe.

So Hoffmann, which casts the writer himself as the protagonist of his stories, offers plenty to capture the audience's imagination. The people on the other side of the footlights are the ones who face extra challenges.

On top of all the usual decisions involved in staging an opera -- about casting, stage direction, sets and costumes -- Hoffmann presents extra ones. Directors and conductors can't just decide to do Hoffmann. They first have to figure out what version of it they'll produce.

You see, 120 years after the premiere, the music of Hoffmann is less an official score than a grab bag -- with parts that are obligatory, of course, but some that are decidedly optional.

Soprano Brenda Harris, who will play Hoffmann's four loves, has several productions of Hoffmann behind her. She says there's only one constant.

"No matter what you do, it's always different," Harris said. "It messes with your brain for a little part of the rehearsal period."

The problem started with Offenbach himself, but you can't exactly blame him. After spending three years on what he hoped would be his magnum opus, he died before his work was done.

Others stepped in to put on the finishing touches and see Hoffmann through to its premiere. But the result was hardly the Hoffmann that Offenbach might have envisioned.

At the opening, early in 1881, one entire tale was left out, and various bits were moved to new spots or cut. Hoffmann was a hit, though, and within a few years it had been staged as far away as the United States. But trouble struck again in 1887: A fire at the Paris Opera destroyed the original scores and related materials, eliminating one of the few, tenuous links to whatever Offenbach had really wanted.

Through time, Offenbach's desires became more or less the last thing that opera houses kept in mind when staging Hoffmann.

Tinkering was the norm. The act dropped at the premiere -- about Hoffmann's misadventure with the courtesan Giulietta -- was spliced back in, but in a different form and location than Offenbach planned.

More than 20 years after the composer's death, a Berlin production took an aria from another Offenbach piece and turned it into that number for Dapertutto, the malefactor in the Giulietta scene. It stayed put, and its lilt and seductiveness made it another audience favorite. Still, many productions eliminated the role of the Muse, who appears at the end to urge Hoffmann, to be portrayed in Orlando by tenor Stephen Mark Brown, to turn his adventures into literature. Other productions merely let her speak a few words.

Eventually, inquisitive musicians began to wonder what Offenbach had had in mind. Their work sometimes turned into archaeology: In the 1970s, an Offenbach specialist visited the home of a descendant of the composer's, dug into an armoire, and found about 1,000 pages of the composer's manuscripts. Long-lost parts of Hoffmann made up part of the trove.

With that discovery and others, there was more music than anyone had suspected. So now, directors have decide what to use.

Practically no one takes all the rediscovered music, because that would make a night that would tax both the singers' voices -- especially Hoffmann's -- and the audience's stamina. The theory is that Offenbach himself, as a savvy man of the theater, would have pared some of it if he had lived. But directors are most tempted by parts that flesh out the role of Nicklausse, Hoffmann's sidekick, and the much-mistreated role of the Muse.

Bits of both will be included in Orlando. Robert Swedberg, the Orlando Opera's general director and Hoffmann's stage director, notes that this isn't a matter of historical curiosity. The new music can help give the opera's conclusion a whole different impact.